Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes
Sacrifice” and “self” both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that.
An obese ego is just about the heaviest thing you’ll ever carry. So maybe you should stop feeding it.
The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.
The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others.
Often we don’t see the majesty of God’s design because we’re caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs.
I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands.
To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.
Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.
I am thankful that in the giving we receive, and what we receive is the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we give is always bigger once we’ve given it away.
Love knows nothing of short hauls because it has committed itself for the long haul.
Real accomplishments do virtually nothing to serve me and they do everything to serve others. Anything less is nothing more than a meaningless task dressed in the deceptive finery of accomplishments.
I am thankful that to be attuned to the needs of another attunes us to the world, and that if I stay attuned only to my needs I will always be a stranger to the world.
I am thankful that sacrifice is non-negotiable, and that counting the cost in giving to another is foolishly assuming that we can put a price on sacrifice.
There’s something tightly woven throughout the fabric of our humanity that runs entirely opposite to the baser instinct of looking out for our own good.
Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature, that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.
The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints.
In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.
We opt to be seen as ‘right’ in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what’s ‘right’ in light of the situation.
I paved the path to the very place I don’t want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn’t put me any place else.
If the truth gets in the way, I will remove it. But truth be told, removing the truth never removes the truth.
I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.
It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.
If in fact it’s not too late to realize that something’s ‘too late’, then there’s a good chance that it’s not.
Being lost without grasping the rather obvious fact that we are lost is by far the best guarantee we have that we’re going to stay lost.
Can anything be called an achievement if it does not simultaneously enhance the life of someone other than the one who has done the achieving?
I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me.
I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all, ’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.
Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?
It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.
The ‘deep pause’ needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a ‘deep pause’ to be deeply wasteful.
Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.
Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.
Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.
We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.
Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.
Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.
Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.
Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind’s grandiose sense of greatness.